THURSDAY PUZZLE — Occasionally, we get mail from people who are shocked, absolutely shocked, at an entry or clue that appears in the puzzles, and that is always interesting because everyone’s mileage for what is “appropriate” in a newspaper crossword puzzle varies significantly.

Today, Richard Mausser and our editors push that envelope by offering solvers the dirtiest puzzle ever to be published in this venue. Get out your smelling salts and let’s proceed.

Today’s Theme

Let me take that back. Perhaps this is the cleanest puzzle ever published in The New York Times, because the word “dirty” has been neatly excised from all theme entries except the revealer. We have a DIRTY DOZEN, in fact: Twelve phrases that all start with the word “dirty” are placed carefully in Mr. Mausser’s grid, using only the second word. So, while the answer to 1A’s “Bit of blue humor” might be DIRTY JOKE, only JOKE gets placed in the grid.

All of the theme entries are starred to help solvers locate them, and Mr. Mausser wisely settled on mirror image symmetry for his grid to make relatively decent filling possible.

I really liked this puzzle, and not just because it’s “dirty.” It obviously took a lot of work to place the theme entries in this grid and not go stark, raving mad. (Please see Mr. Mausser’s notes below.) There is quite a lot of theme material here, and I like the way (dirty) MARTINI plunges through (Dirty) HARRY and (dirty) LAUNDRY. Similarly, (dirty) PICTURE runs right through the revealer, the movie “THE DIRTY DOZEN,” which celebrates its 50th anniversary today. Mr. Mausser wisely pins his other theme entries to the edges of his grid, giving them as much breathing room as possible in a 15x15 puzzle.

Tricky Clues

I predict that some solvers will find today’s nontheme clues a bit on the easy side for a Thursday. That might be true, but they will also have to figure out that the first word of 12 theme phrases is missing, which toughens up the solve considerably.

Even so, I had a few stumbling blocks:

■ 5A: I’m not a beer drinker, so this was not in my wheelhouse. But it was advertised as being “from the land of sky blue waters.”

■ 25A: Wordplay alert! A “Race leader?” could be someone who is winning a foot race, or it could be the first member of a race, who was the biblical ADAM.

■ 36A: The Houston Astros play in Minute Maid Park, and it seems that if you want to abbreviate their name, you can just knock off the first letter and call them the STROs. Because baseball is wacky like that.

Constructor Notes

When my muse first dropped this “dirty” little idea on me several years ago, it was presented as more of a challenge than an opportunity. Almost an “I dare you to try and fit 13 theme entries into a 15 x 15 grid!”

So started a steady cycle of submissions, rejections, and complete rewrites. At one point in the process, Joel even commented that “the massive amount of theme material might make this too tough to construct in a clean way.” With the 50th anniversary date of the movie looming, it finally occurred to me that using mirror symmetry might provide less constraining grid designs. My next submission came back with “almost a yes,” and after a few more tweaks, my work on this one was finally over.

This puzzle was by far the most difficult and time-consuming of my limited work to date. The challenge was not so much selecting good fill, but more a function of finding any fill that might work. The statistician in me points out that only 10 words in the final grid do not contribute at least one letter to a theme entry. Squeezing in all the theme material also required nine of the 13 entries to intersect with one other in some fashion. So while “glue” like SLYS, RRS, OPP and OPE were less than optimal, I am content knowing I considered countless alternative options.

For those who want to keep score, other “dirty words” used in earlier failed submissions included: POLITICS, LANGUAGE, DANCING, SHAME, MIND, RICE, POOL and DOG.

Fast forward to this week: I was very pleasantly surprised to see the puzzle run on a Thursday, the actual anniversary date of the movie. I felt my accepted submission was geared to earlier in the week. But Will and Joel appropriately took the cluing up a notch, while still leaving the spirit of most of my original clues intact. If I had a choice to reclaim one clue, it would be “Carrie Underwood hit that includes Ajax as a lyric” for “Dirty” LAUNDRY.

Many thanks to Will and Joel for their steady and patient advice. I hope the gimmick doesn’t reveal itself too early, and that solvers enjoy the end result.

Postscript: If pressured, I might admit that the answer to 57-down was intended to subliminally influence the opinion of certain New York Times crossword reviewers. [I wonder who that could be. — D. A. ] With news this week of Adam West’s passing, I would rather dedicate both the clue and the answer to his memory.